This is not the view from my office…but it is a view of my new home city – Jacksonville, FL.
“A Floor, But No Ceiling”
In the spirit of practicing what one preaches, I have entered the blogosphere. I am a month into my new headship at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School after spending five years as the founding head of the Solomon Schechter Day School of Las Vegas. Our teachers are required to blog and, therefore, so should I. So here I am.
I didn’t know it was possible to leave Las Vegas and find somewhere even more uncomfortable during the summer, but it is. Differences in humidity aside, my wife, two daughters and I are slowly adjusting to our new home. We are enjoying the southern hospitality and warm welcome we have received. I am enjoying getting to know the staff, parents, students, and teachers of my new school.
We are a 21st century learning school invested in the continuity of a five thousand year-old tradition. Our attempts to marry the past and the future into an engaging present will largely be the focus of my blog. I have teachers better qualified than I already blogging about the specifics of 21st century learning, technological innovation and global learning. Once I learn how to link to their blogs, I invite you to read them with regularity.
Most of my blogging will center on experiences here at school, but I hope to be of interest to anyone interested in Jewish day school, Jewish education, education in general, and in the kinds of stuff I think happen to be interesting and worth sharing. I guess we’ll find out soon enough!
Why “A Floor, But No Ceiling”? Because it represents what I believe the purpose of education to be – to ensure each child fulfills his or her own individual maximum potentials in academic, emotional, physical, and spiritual terms. There are appropriate benchmarks to determine minimum standards for each grade level, but our aims are higher. That is simply the floor upon which we build. For there to be no ceiling has direct implications about what we teach and how we teach it. I hope to use this blog to discuss these ideas and more.
I look forward to learning how to best use my blog to communicate and to be in communication with others. Comments are welcome.